Evolution of Applications from Multichain to Crosschain by Mark Anstead (@The_Shark_7)

Transcript

all right everybody how's it going I just want to say hello my name is Mark ansted I do business development over at fujifinance and today we're going to be talking about the evolution of an application uh so but before I get started I know it's been a a very busy last couple days so uh to everybody in the audience thank you for joining and listening in and hopefully uh you guys learned something new and have been able to learn something new over the last couple days so let's jump into it so going over a little bit of the history of just applications in general we're going to be talking about how applications have sort of evolved over

the last couple years or last few years and where I sort of see them evolving uh moving forward so moving back a few years the first large application on ethereum really launched back in 2016. this is known as the Dow unfortunately this dap that was launched didn't really have the the best outcome ended up getting hacked but and this ended up creating uh the the creation of ethereum classic and then shortly thereafter the first mainstream application that was launched was in 2017 very well known as crypto kitties this basically clogged the entire ethereum network became super

popular and everybody was trading it and it was a lot of fun and then after the boom of uh all these icos that were happening in 2017 many dap developers they needed to determine which network that they were going to be going and deploying different types of applications to and if we go back a few years there are a few different networks that people could look to to deploy on so if people were around a few years ago some of these networks might seem a little bit familiar or maybe dated so like ethereum EOS Tron steemit Clayton um even Neo some of these things don't

really exist for the most part anymore but obviously around that time ethereum was the biggest and The Baddest of Them All so why did so many applications go and deploy to ethereum you could go and permissionlessly deploy and build virtually anything it had the largest developer Community a lot of the tooling was beautiful it was the most mature secure and decentralized chain out there so all of these developers were like this is where we have to go and deploy if you're deploying anywhere else you're probably not doing it properly but as many people know life on ethereum isn't necessarily perfect I mean I I'm

I've been a builder on ethereum I love it but it's got its flaws uh during that time uh there were a lot of gas spikes we still have gas spikes today though we're looking to improve on that but back in like 2017 and 2018 there was a huge gas Spike around crypto kitties and then coming into 2020 with defy summer it was app absolutely insane just going and making like a regular erc20 transfer sending like usdc could cost you as much as like 50 to 100 it was it was brutal and that led to some of these memes saying these gas prices are too damn high it was it was not fun for your uh

for your eth that you had to spend uh and this essentially evolved into what's known as the multi-chain thesis uh basically every single developer uh realized okay with all these fees just getting absolutely insane we would be crazy just to stick to ethereum because if you do most likely some of your activity is going to decrease because it's becoming too expensive for some of your users and developers they needed to look for Alternatives and since solidity and the evm became the norm a lot of these other chains started to get activity and people started to deploy to them

and some of these retail users are like oh this is this is a little bit nicer it's a little bit cheaper it's a little bit faster and some of these side chains started to get a lot of growth so like BSC now known as BNB chain polygon POS X dye Phantom and even avalanche's sea chain they all started to really flourish and grow in terms of activity but with a multi-chain thesis there are going to be different types of pros and cons obviously you have better throughput you have lower fees you're still able to have evm compatibility and you have a new community that you're able to go and Market to some of the cons are fragmented

liquidity and obviously you're not really going to be secured by ethereum you have different types of security assumptions and this actually ended up giving the rise to different types of l2s I mean I'm not going to lie I'm very biased I'm a huge L2 bull I have been for for quite some time and many of these networks during this period of time they were heads down in development they weren't actually production ready but some of these Solutions are now starting to to evolve and come into production so some of these are like optimistic Roll-Ups and ZK Roll-Ups I'm a big fan of both of those Solutions and some of the teams that are building them

and the tvl for them are starting to explode and so why are some of the teams going and now building on Layer Two well it's cheaper than ethereum similar to some of these evm side Chains It's secured by mainnet so any transaction that's occurring you're still able to have security of ethereum it's faster can still support the evm and a lot of the tooling can be very similar so for some of these like optimistic Roll-Ups as an example you can have what's known as evm equivalents that means that you don't have to have any type of changes to your code to go and deploy it onto these types of networks and even some ZK Roll-Ups are working towards that as

well but uh with this multi-chain thesis and L2 it is still causing problems uh liquidity has now been fragmented uh so if you're a user uh building around defy uh it can get a little bit hectic especially if you're playing around with significantly larger amounts of capital this liquidity is now separated on all of these all of these different silos and these different I would just call them verticals so on all these different networks like ethereum BNB chain Tron arbitrum optimism polygon Avalanche Phantom all of these different solutions they all have their own isolated

ecosystems they can't communicate with one another it's a big problem and as we're looking to really scale out these ecosystems as a whole or these types of applications it becomes a problem and as new l2s are able to be deployed it is a permissionless process to deploy an L2 this fragmentation it's only going to continue and this has now led to a new breed of type of application that we've seen over the last I would say like six to 12 maybe even 18 months and these are different types of cross-chain applications and the goal of them is to really abstract away the use of individual types of networks to optimize

the user experience and if you're like a defy application to unify the liquidity that has now been fragmented so we're going to just take a quick peek at a few examples of a few teams that are focusing on these types of solutions which is uh Sushi or sushi Foundation Levi Fuji Finance I will say I'm a little bit biased there I'm on the team at Fuji as well as radiant capital so starting off with sushi for those of you who aren't really familiar with sushi they did sort of a vampire vampire attack to UNI swap back in 2020 during the mid of defy summer and they were

really only deployed to ethereum they went through the same life cycle they were a single chain then they went multi-chain they were like okay if you're any type of evm compatible network Sushi is deploying there that was like their mindset and over the last six to 12 months they've taken a very different approach because they have all of this liquidity and all these different networks but it's all fragmented so they've been working with actually the layer zero team to build what's now known as Sushi X swap where you can not only Bridge assets across different networks you can also swap through the different types of sushi swap pools so you're able to access the liquidity on all these different networks and one of

the cool things about it is you can view the route with how like the the trade and the transaction is actually occurring and so it it really helps to make that user experience a lot better it's helping to unify the liquidity when you're going to make these trades another one is Levi they've sort of taken a similar approach to Sushi swap around cross chain swapping although they have gone I would say one step further in terms of what they are offering because not only are they a cross chain swap aggregator similar to like Paris swap or one inch or Dex AG but they're also a bridge aggregator so they go and aggregate all the different

types of liquidity layers and messaging layers to essentially go and offer not only the best bridge but also the best swap for you as a user so different types of applications are starting to integrate with them and build on top of their SDK so one of the things that's actually really cool that uh that they're working on right now which for me as a user outside of just swapping your C20 tokens which I do fairly frequently is the ability to go and purchase any nft from any chain so for me like I primarily use ethereum and many of like the l2s on ethereum

but I might not be using some of these side chains that some of these nft projects are going and deploying on well with Levi with one of the things that they're working on you will then be able to go and just have your assets On the Origin chain and go and say I want to purchase this nft on x y z chain and your funds from the origin chain can be swapped into a bridge asset or just Bridge the origin asset and swap into another asset to purchase that nft and that can all be done very seamlessly from the end user's experience so making that process a lot simpler

another example is fujifinance we are building I should say we I'm on the team we are building a cross chain money market aggregator where you can deposit borrow and repay a position from any chain so one of the things that we have have seen over the last couple years since the lending markets have really started to evolve and essentially gone multi-chain is we're starting to see new smart contracts getting deployed on all these chains we're seeing new networks being deployed and all these money markets they're they're fragmented and so the Fuji team is essentially looking to unify all of this liquidity and allow you to access it through through one interface so you can go and

essentially optimize either your yield or your borrow rates from all of these different types of money markets another example which has actually gotten a lot of hype I would say recently especially on crypto Twitter is radiant Capital they are building what's known as a Omni chain money market so you can deposit and borrow an asset from any chain they're actually building on top of of layer zero and currently the the money market that they are working on this V2 it's not live just yet their V1 is live on arbitrum and then their V2 is going to be live built on top of layer zero so you can do all these cool

functionalities and it's really helping to make that user experience significantly better and it just really helps out the end user and people that are building on top of these Solutions so the big question here are cross chain apps perfect we're probably moving into this uh new paradigm where developers are going to start architecting and building their products to be natively cross-chain are they perfect short answer is no but all these teams are working towards being as trustless as possible similar to any other type of normal application because none can be guaranteed to be perfect not even uni swap or compound or

Ave the biggest behemoths of them all none of them are technically perfect we can strive towards Perfection but it's not guaranteed to happen and these types of solutions they're simply an evolution of application architecture to make the end users experience significantly better and to help onboard more users and make this whole process that much easier for for users and developers to uh to build around so that's all I have for you all today again thank you all for for listening my name is Mark Anson I'm on the on the Fuji team and uh yeah I hope you all have had a wonderful time

over the last couple days and yeah if you guys have any questions feel free like raise your hand s you can you can speak out loud feel free if not thank you all for your time and cheers do you have a question or oh okay cool thank you guys enjoy